California Concrete Canoe

This amazing story is here thanks to a heads up from Elizabeth. Reader contributions like this are a big help and greatly improve the quality of the blog. When I first got Elizabeth’s email about geopolymer canoes, an image of a thick, clunky canoe popped in mind. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the CAL Canoe web page! I love to canoe. This technology opens a whole new avenue for geopolymer research. Can geopolymer house boats and other types of boats be far off?

From their website:
Cal Concrete Canoe is a team composed of mainly civil engineering undergraduate students, though we do have several members from other majors. From freshmen to seniors, students at all levels in their education actively contribute to the project each year and have a great time doing it!

Every year, we design, construct, and paddle our concrete canoe against other universities in Northern California and Nevada. If successful at the regional competition, we take our canoe to nationals and compete against the best schools in the United States and Canada. Getting to nationals is not easy; it takes a lot of teamwork. In order to qualify you must beat out all the other schools in your region. Teams are judged on 4 categories: final product (the canoe and display), technical paper, oral presentation, and paddling.

It is similar to my thin-shelled dome in some ways. But the canoes use fibers or mesh instead of rebar. This sounds more like fiberglass. So there’s obviously a whole new range of products I had never considered.